Modern cosmologists and theoretical physicists who think the universe is spatially infinite

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    Thoughts today after picking up a fallen pear...prolepsis--->Letter to Herodotus--->the infinite universe...

    Here are some modern cosmologists and theoretical physicists who think that the universe is spatially infinite (models of cosmic inflation that point to an infinite or eternally growing multiverse).

    Andrei Linde - https://profiles.stanford.edu/andrei-linde

    Quote

    "For a long time, scientists believed that our universe was born in the big bang, as an expanding ball of fire. This scenario dramatically changed during the last 35 years. Now we think that initially the universe was rapidly inflating, being in an unstable energetic vacuum-like state. It became hot only later, when this vacuum-like state decayed. Quantum fluctuations produced during inflation are responsible for galaxy formation. In some places, these quantum fluctuations are so large that they can produce new rapidly expanding parts of the universe. This process makes the universe immortal and transforms it into a multiverse, a huge fractal consisting of many exponentially large parts with different laws of low-energy physics operating in each of them."

    Alan Guth - https://www.scientificamerican.com/custom-media/b…next-big-ideas/

    Quote

    "The idea is that the universe is actually eternal. It existed at all times, so there is no beginning to explain. The laws of physics themselves don’t seem to make any significant distinction between the future and the past. As the universe evolves, its entropy, or disorder, will grow. What we call the future is simply the direction of higher entropy; a state of lower entropy is what we call the past. But a curious thing happens if you take this initial low entropy state and follow it backwards in time, towards what we previously called the past: the entropy will also start to grow in that direction. I think that the people living [along that arrow of time] would not feel anything different from what we feel. Everybody will think that they’re living from the past towards the future, except what they call the future will be what we call the past."

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    Both Andrei Linde and Alan Guth appear to be off the main stream and partly contradict my understanding. "It became hot only later, when this vacuum-like state decayed" does not make sense to me. Spatial infinity is agreeable to me in the sense that the horizon expands indefinitely. At least as far as the future is concerned, temporal infinity is agreeable, too.

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